Encyclopedia of

Brown, John

The abolitionist crusader John Brown died on December 2, 1859, executed by
the state of Virginia for charges relating to treason, murder, and
promoting a slave insurrection. Although Brown's public execution
took place before the start of the U.S. Civil War, his life and death
anticipated the impending battle between the North and the South over the
moral legitimacy of slavery in America, and served as a source of
righteous inspiration for both sides immediately before and during the
course of the war. Beyond that, Brown's death serves as a case
study in the construction and power of martyrdom. Proslavery supporters
reviled Brown, whose often bloody actions against the social institution
fueled southern fears about northern aggression. Many supporters and
fervent abolitionists, on the other hand, glorified Brown, whose sacrifice
for a higher good transformed the unsuccessful businessman into a national
martyr.

Born in Connecticut on May 9, 1800, Brown became involved in the
abolitionist movement early in life. His father was a strict Calvinist who
abhorred slavery as a particularly destructive sin against God. Brown
himself witnessed the brutality of slavery when, as a twelve-year-old boy,
he saw a young slave ferociously beaten with a shovel by his owner, an
image that remained with Brown for the rest of his life. After the
Illinois abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a
proslavery mob in 1837, Brown publicly declared his intention to find a
way to end slavery in the United States.

In the midst of extreme economic hardships and failed business ventures,
Brown moved with some of his sons to Kansas following the passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act, heavily supported by southern slave-holding
states, allowed people in new territories to vote on the question of
slavery. During the 1850s, Kansas was the scene of a number of horrific
acts of violence from groups on both sides of the issue. Brown placed
himself in the thick of these bloody conflicts and, with a group of other
like-minded zealots, hacked five proslavery men to death with broadswords,
an event that came to be known as the Pottawatomie Massacre.

In the summer of 1859, Brown led a small army of men, including his own
sons, to Harper's
Ferry, Virginia, with a plan to invade the South and incite a slave
rebellion. The group successfully raided the armory at Harper's
Ferry but, after the arrival of Colonel Robert E. Lee and his troops,
Brown's plans fell apart, and his men either escaped, died, or were
captured by Lee's men in the ensuing battle. Brown himself was
captured and stood trial in Virginia, where his fate was determined by an
unsympathetic jury.

Brown, however, did not understand his failed invasion and impending death
as a defeat for the abolitionist cause. Instead, he believed these events
had crucial historical and religious significance, and that rather than
signaling an end would be the beginning of the eventual elimination of
slavery in America. Brown greatly admired stories about the prophets in
the Bible, and came to believe that God, rather than a Virginia jury, had
determined his fate. Convinced that his martyrdom could have more of an
impact than any of his earlier schemes, Brown faced death with calm
assurance and optimism that an abolitionist victory was secured with his
imminent execution.

Brown was not the only one who understood the significant political
implications of his execution in religious terms. Indeed, major northern
abolitionists who would not countenance Brown's violent strategies
to end slavery while alive, embraced the language of martyrdom after his
death on the gallows. New England cultural figures like Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Lydia Maria Child, to name a few,
identified Brown as the first true abolitionist martyr, serving as an
iconic symbol of righteousness, redemption, and regeneration. Although
others perished with him on the gallows, for many northerners John Brown
was transformed into a hero who deserved to be included in the pantheon of
great Americans and who died for the good of the United States.

Not everyone agreed with this assessment though. Immediately after his
death, southern citizens and many in the North turned him into a demon
rather than a hero, and wanted his corpse to suffer indignities reserved
for the lowest criminals, including the suggestion that it be turned over
to a medical school for dissection. The governor of Virginia decided to
release the body of the deceased to Brown's wife, Mary, and allow
it to be transported to the family farm in North Elba, New York. During
the journey north, Brown's dead

Abolitionist John Brown, being escorted from prison to his execution
in Virginia, 1859. His death foreshadowed the approaching battle
between the North and the South over the morality of slavery.

ARCHIVE PHOTOS, INC.

body aroused a great deal of interest. In Philadelphia, a large crowd of
people from African-American abolitionist and proslavery communities
turned out to meet the body upon its arrival in the city. The mayor, along
with Mary Brown and her supporters, feared a riot might ensue, and decided
to send an empty coffin to the local undertaker as a decoy so the
container with Brown's body could make it to the wharf and continue
its journey by boat to New York City.

Reaching its final destination, people came to see the coffin containing
Brown's body, with some towns finding various ways to commemorate
the martyr while the corpse passed through. On December 7, 1859,
Brown's body arrived in North Elba, and was laid out in the front
room of the house for visiting relatives, friends, and supporters to see
before it vanished for good after the funeral the next day. After the
corpse of John Brown had been placed in the ground at his home, the memory
of his violent campaign to end slavery and the
symbolism of his death in the state of Virginia continued to materialize
in American imaginative and social landscapes. During the U.S. Civil War,
for example, one of the most popular songs among Union forces urged
soldiers to remember his body "a-mouldering in the
grave"—in time, a song that would be transformed with new
lyrics by Julia Ward Howe into "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic." The cultural memory of John Brown's life after
the war and into the twentieth century assumed a variety of forms,
including Stephen Vincent Benét's famous Pulitzer
Prize–winning poem, "John Brown's Body," and
the establishment of schools bearing his name.